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Tradition

Old-world craft creates dazzling, delicate eggs

Request to buy this photoFred Squillante | DispatchThese are some examples of professionally colored Ukrainian Easter eggs that artist and instructor Ginny Baughman brought to the workshop as examples.

Request to buy this photoFred Squillante | DispatchMickey Merritt of Upper Arlington carefully handles the egg she is coloring.

Request to buy this photoFred Squillante | DispatchSophia Rester of Blacklick adds green dye to her egg during a workshop on decorating Ukrainian Easter eggs at Inniswood Metro Gardens in Westerville.

Request to buy this photoFred Squillante | DispatchThe boldly colored and patterned eggs are created with wax coatings and dye baths.

They could have given their Easter eggs the routine dye job. But the 16 participants of the
Ukrainian egg workshop at Westerville’s Inniswood Metro Gardens had their reasons for picking up a
kistka and working in wax.

The elaborately decorated Ukrainian Easter eggs, known as
pysanky in their homeland, were a curiosity for some; for others, a chance to try their
hand at a new craft. Some class participants sought a respite from the last of winter’s drab and
cold, finding a promise of spring in the bright hues into which they dipped their eggs.

And then there were folks like Dani Livelsberger of Reynoldsburg, who felt a cultural connection
through the eggs that she and her 15-year-old daughter, Elise Mabry, were decorating yesterday.

Livelsberger’s late grandmother, Margaret Cusick, grew up in a Ukrainian orphanage. The eggs,
Livelsberger said, remind her of the geometric patterns she saw on plates and blankets as a child
while visiting her grandmother’s home in the northeastern Ohio town of Conneaut.

“We own a buffet from her, so maybe we’ll put them up there,” Livelsberger said, deliberating
with her daughter on where to display their eggs.

“That’d be good,” Elise said.

Mimi Kinard of Columbus described the challenge of decorating a Ukrainian Easter egg as “
thinking in reverse.”

First, class participants drew designs on eggshells whose contents had already been blown out.
They heated the points of their
kistkas, or writing tools, in the flame of candles, then scooped a bit of beeswax on the
points. Daintily, they drew lines of wax as straight and of as even width as possible on the
eggs.

The eggs are initially dipped in a light color, such as yellow, before more wax is applied in a
different pattern. The process is repeated with progressively darker dyes — orange, scarlet, blue
and black among them. About two hours later, the decorators held their eggs beside a candle flame
to warm the layers of wax, then wiped it away to reveal the finished product.

Sisters Arianne Saunders of Pataskala and Shannon Saunders of Bexley planned to add their
Ukrainian-inspired creations to their family’s display of panoramic sugar eggs, which have scenes
inside an eggshell made of sugar. They were joined by their mother, Susan Dawson, and Dawson’s
stepdaughter, Amber, both of Westerville.

“It’s always a surprise,” said class instructor and artist Ginny Baughman, whose own mother was
a Russian native who spent part of her childhood in the Ukraine. “I’m always amazed at how gorgeous
they look.”